I finally played Don't Starve. I hated it at first sight. The graphics look weird. The gameplay is odd, like Minecraft meets Diablo, but with permadeath. You punch a shrub and pick up some flint off the ground, so that you can hit trees and rocks for logs and stones. Things go uphill from there.

The game features a multitude of ways to die. I've experienced a few. Much as it is not the fall that kills you, but the sudden stop, starvation is merely the thing that pushes you away from your comfortable fire into the deadly world.

For the most part you're safe. You can chop trees and dig up graves and trap rabbits. But sometimes the trees come alive and attack you. Sometimes a ghost prefers that you not rob his grave. Sometimes, well the rabbit-trapping seems to be perfectly safe. As long as you don't encounter a pack of wolves.

It was the exploration that killed me. I wanted to go out, see the world, which is a fine impulse in most circumstances. But for some reason I chose the winter to do it. During winter you can freeze to death when away from fires and earmuffs only buy time. Freezing means losing health, so you have to have some way to recover; normal cooked food is extremely inefficient at health recovery, but dried meat works well. I'd not stockpiled, nor brought much on the trip. It was meant to be a little jaunt around the area, just a little jump into a wormhole to see where I ended up. I nearly froze and starved before I got back to my home base.

Bases aren't safe areas. They're just areas (that you set up yourself) where the cold and darkness themselves won't kill you. Animals and monsters will still attack. And so, starving and weak, I was attacked by a trio of wolves. I was not going to survive it, but I hoped that maybe they couldn't follow me through the wormhole. I set out running across the frozen land, hoping the cold wouldn't kill me first, knowing that on the other side of the wormhole I'd left a single campfire. Running and running, just barely ahead of their snappings mouths, I got to the wormhole.